


Human-Computer Interaction

by Ishimaru



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, Dangan Ronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Non-Despair, Explicit Language, Gun Violence, M/M, Minor Violence, Robot/Human Relationships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-18 22:17:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10626240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ishimaru/pseuds/Ishimaru
Summary: Human-Computer Interaction - (HCI) Analysis of the relationship of computers and humans.Something makes Ishimaru, Mondo's service bot, break down. He is not enthused by the resulting change in personality.





	1. Autonomous

Mondo winced as Ishimaru’s eyes flared up once more, sending sparks skidding across the metal floor before extinguishing. He had him plugged into his charging center, and was fiddling with the screws in the control panel inset in his chest. He removed the panel covering the delicate wiring, and checked the battery on the left side of the Ishimaru’s chest, where a human’s heart would be, for signs of wear and damage.  
  
“Wha-at i-is wrong, Mo-ondo?” Ishimaru’s jittery voice sputtered to the tinkering mechanic. He had been having this odd pattern of speaking since the day before, which began surreptitiously, but quickly worsened.  
  
“I think yer battery’s overheating. Damn … I don’t know why, everything else checks out.” He cocked his head and peered into his creation’s intricate wiring, trying to spot anything minutely out of place.  
  
“Wo-ould you li-ike me to run a dia-agnostic check for v-viruses in my files, kyoudai?”  
  
Mondo couldn’t suppress his grin at the affectionate nickname. He had asked the assistant bot to call him his brother early on in their relationship; after all, he had repaired him from his initial distressed state in his brother’s image, with black hair, albeit more differences than similarities at this point as he had steadily deviated from his original intentions. He had soon begun to find, however, with burning embarassment, that he couldn't seem to think of the servant bot as a brother anymore, but rather as something more.  
“Could ya do that for me? Hopefully that’ll give us a lead, and I can get to work fixin’ ya.”  
  
Ishimaru nodded curtly and his glowing red eyes began to pulse as he straightened his posture, sitting plumb straight, and he stared unseeing at the wall somewhere behind Mondo’s shoulder.  
  
“Ru-unning diagno-ostic check … Please wa-ait,” he requested jerkily. One of his eyes twitched as sparks flew once more from his overheating irises. “Te-en minutes rema-aining. Plea-se wait.”  
  
Mondo waited patiently for a moment before his thoughts were overcome with worries and concerns over his greatest invention. A virus had been going around recently, which was coined Despair.exe for its depression-like effects on various droids. He hoped this wasn’t what Ishimaru was experimenting; he had no way to dispel something like that.  
Mondo went to the kitchen, resolving to make himself a coffee to break out of his mid-morning daze as Ishimaru searched for dead-ends and malignant software deep within his coding. He poured water into the coffee maker and waited for it to boil, recounting how he first found Ishimaru in an alley; he had been in parts, entire chunks of his code and wiring missing. Half of the metal over his face had been melted off, and one of his legs was completely detached from his torso. Mondo had taken the android to his workshop (which was just the garage of his house, incidentally), planning to use him for scrap parts before discovering an odd, crown-like emblem embossed into the inside of his chest panel. Through some help of a childhood friend of his, a programmer (who also helped to re-write much of Ishimaru’s code), they discovered the corporation that owned the copyright to the symbol; the Togami Corporation. The Togami Corporation mass-produced everything from kitchenware to top secret military weapons, they found through some skilled hacking. More importantly, the two found within the files of the multimillion dollar corporation a blueprint for the prototype of a servant and defense robot; this was Ishimaru 1.0. How he turned up destroyed in the streets, Mondo couldn’t be sure; empty speculations are all the mechanic could muster for the time being.  
  
He added his favorite caramel creamer to his coffee and stirred, taking a sip. Then he heard a crash from the garage which made his hot coffee spill onto his hand painfully. He hissed and hurriedly wiped it off on his wife beater and rushes to the garage; did some of his tools fall down? Maybe Ishimaru’s battery had drained itself and the droid had fallen? The overheating did seem severe, perhaps enough so that it could empty all its --  
  
He opened the door to the garage, and his robot servant had indeed fallen, but he was blinking at Mondo in the doorway now from the ground, before his face set into an ugly scowl. His entire body was in a state of severe overheating, especially his eyes and hair, which seemed to glow with heat. Mondo knew it would probably burn him badly to touch Ishimaru now. His eyes almost seemed to burn fire, but perhaps that was because of the intensity with which he stared at his kyoudai.  
Ishimaru lifted up his hand and to Mondo’s utter surprise and horror, it morphed into a bulky turret-like gun and he pointed it at Mondo experimentally. The mechanic in question leapt back, shielding his body with the doorway as the white-haired android released a flurry of bullets across his workshop, knocking over projects and shattering windows with glee.  
Meanwhile Mondo was curled up behind the wall, covering his head and ears. The shots stopped, and he heard a click, but didn’t dare to look around the doorway.  
  
“Threat eliminated. Defensive parameters not detected. Defensive mode disengaging.” The voice sounded uncannily like Ishimaru’s, but not quite.  
  
Taking this as his sign that it was safe to expose himself, Mondo peered around the doorway cautiously and watched as metal folded into metal, and the gun transformed to become Ishimaru’s familiar snowy-white hand, and he flexed it experimentally, red eyes pulsing with curious intensity.  
  
Ishimaru then robotically lifted his head to look at a pasty-faced Mondo in the doorway, and adopted an uncharacteristic albeit very genuine grin, one that was closer to a smirk than to his usual small, reserved smile.  
  
“Aniki!” Ishimaru’s jittery voice seemed to be fixed, but now there were other problems; Ishimaru had always referred to his creator as “kyoudai.” This was new.  
  
“I-Ishimaru?” Mondo asked uncertainly, still reeling from the sudden turn of events.  
  
“Ishida version 2.4,” he corrected sternly, before trying to get up clumsily. Mondo noticed he seemed to move differently; less stiffly. This new Ishimaru didn’t seem to hold his shoulder so straight or his head so high, but with a more natural swagger. With his stiff boots, “Ishida” struggled to rise and slipped, ending up spread-eagled on the floor.  
  
“Here, lemme help you, Ishima-- Ishida.”  
  
Mondo took his hand, which was warm, but far from burning, and pulled the smaller droid up. As soon as he was on his unsteady feet, Ishida threw himself at Mondo and wrapped his arms around him in a hug. “I’ll always protect aniki! That’s why I’m here!”  
  
Mondo yelped in pain; Ishida had pressed his cheek to Mondo’s own, and it was hot. It burned and left a red welt on his face, and he reflexively pushed Ishida away, who looked shocked, then heartbroken at the rejection.  
  
_Oh no, don’t look at me like that._ “I, I’m sorry, uh, Ishida. You’re overheating, it burned. Why, uh, why aren’t you Ishimaru anymore?”  
  
His expression darkened at Ishimaru’s name. “Because I’m better. I have defensive capabilities to keep you safe! All Ishimaru can do is clean dishes or whatever.”  
  
“No! He’s so much more than that,” Mondo immediately snapped back without thinking. Ishida winced. His hands wringed the bottom his uniform nervously.  
  
“I- I’m sorry, sorry. I didn’t ever see your…’defensive capabilities’ on your blueprints.”  
  
Ishida tilted his head as though processing something, before seemingly coming to a realization. “Ah! You only had half the blueprints, silly aniki,” he said curtly.  
  
“Half? No, Chi and I found all of the blueprints for Ishima--”  
  
“For Ishimaru,” Ishida finished. “Not for me!” He pointed a finger towards himself proudly. Registering Mondo’s confused and somewhat exasperated expression, he elaborated. “The one-of-a-kind Ishimaru prototype android you have has two modes: one to assist in household chores, like cleaning and crap, and one for defense in case of any bodily danger that may come to you. I’m here to keep you safe, Mon-mon! I am Ishimaru’s defensive counterpart. An entirely different program! I guess my blueprints were harder to get ahold of. Very classified or whatever.” Ishida shrugged nonchalantly.  
  
Mondo winced at Ishida’s demeanor; he didn’t like his way of speech. It was almost reminiscent of Mondo’s own. He mulled over how to explain to Ishida that there was no “bodily danger” and his services were unnecessary.  
  
“Listen, Ishida…” He put his hand on his shoulder cautiously. It wasn’t as hot as his face, thankfully. “I appreciate yer help, I really do, but I’m safe, yeah?” He gestured around at his destroyed workshop. “Ain’t no danger here right now, and I could use Ishimaru’s help cleaning this mess up, ya see?”  
  
Suddenly, Ishida grew fervent. He spluttered indignantly, and then cried, “You want him, don’t you! You like your little servant more than me! I won’t have it! HE’S NOT FUCKING BETTER THAN ME!”  
  
Mondo rapidly tried to backpedal and keep Ishida from pulling out his machine-gun arm again. This guy was the stuff of nightmares. “No, no, no! I didn’t mean he’s better than you, I mean that you’re good for some things and he’s good for some things and … well, I need ta fix him up, he was having some problems right? And Chi needs’a come and look at his codin’, and, and …”  
  
Mondo was surprised to see Ishida rolling his eyes, an action Ishimaru would never do. “You can do all of that crap later. For now, I want to be with _you_.”  
  
Mondo’s breath hitched at the implications of Ishida’s words. “Eh heh, is that so…? Er, why’s that?”  
  
Ishida was again clinging to the mechanic, latching onto his arm and essentially immobilizing that limb. “Because I think you’re the best ever!” he exclaimed gleefully, giving Mondo an enthusiastic smile, his eyes sparkling behind the barrage of flames.  
  
Mondo gulped. Ishida was cute and all, but he wasn’t _Ishimaru_ , that’s the problem. He wasn’t the robot that Mondo had found, saved, befriended, fell in love with… and now he had no idea how to get him back, and _God_ this was a problem.

 


	2. File Conflictions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mondo has a change of heart, which leads to some feelings of confliction, to say the least.

Mondo and Ishimaru were both humans, and happily holding hands. Mondo’s palms were embarrassingly sweaty against Ishimaru’s soft skin, but he didn’t seem to mind. They were at some sort of fair, surrounded by sights and sounds that paled in comparison to Ishimaru’s silhouette against the nighttime lights, and right as the fireworks went off Ishimaru turned and smiled in such a _tender_ way at Mondo, before leaning in and …

A clang resounded through the modest house, and Mondo started, his head bouncing against the headboard painfully as the sound echoed through his head. He looked down and remembered; after the events of yesterday, he had fallen asleep in his clothes, leaning against the headboard, too worn out by the … _surprising_ series of events that day to bother doing anything more.

Right, yesterday. Well, hell. That was a shitty time. His sweet, gentle Ishimaru, with bright round eyes and a smile which was there one minute like a firework and gone the next was replaced by this scowling, clingy, _violent_ doppelgänger. Sometimes he secretly thinks about how Ishimaru had actually saved Mondo from his depression in the face of his brother’s death, not the other way around. His face reddened and he brushed the thought into a metaphorical dusty corner deep in his mind, before rubbing his back and yawning, and remembering the sharp noise that had interrupted his happy sleep.

Mondo forced himself off of the bed despite the fact that the weight of gravity seemed to double, urging him to sleep for just another five minutes. He fought this feeling with a sudden flood of worried thoughts: _could something have happened to Ishimaru? No, Ishida, that’s what he liked to be called now,_ Mondo thought dejectedly. He threw on a shirt and meandered downstairs, looking for the source of the startling sound. He continued to the kitchen, and froze on the threshold. The kitchen was a complete _mess_ , which was a rare sight with Ishimaru’s insistence on cleaning every little particle of dust or grime.

His eyes followed the remnants of broken dishes and the stained countertop until coming to rest on Ishida, laying spread-eagle on the floor as though he had been trying to make a snow angel, but with the batter that seemed to coat the floor instead of pearly snow.

“Ishida? What’re you doing?”

For a moment the android in question looked sheepish, and he thought he saw a bit of Ishimaru in the way his face flushed, but then Ishida’s demeanor returned with vengeance.

“I was _trying_ to make some goddamn pancakes! But _obviously_ it didn’t work out! I can’t … I can’t do fucking anything RIGHT!” Ishida snapped. Some pancake batter dripped from the edge of the counter above him and fell right onto his white-hot cheek, instantly solidifying and burning into a black crisp.

Mondo looked on, bewildered. To think this used to be his obedient, capable Ishimaru … the thought made him sad.

“Why were you tryin’ ta make pancakes in the first place, Ishida?” He leaned down so he was eye-to-eye with him, and was surprised to see tears budding in his red eyes, before almost immediately evaporating due to the heat emanating off his skin, just to be replaced with more boiling tears.  
“I just want to help you! I want to show you I’m as good as Ishimaru, I want you to love me and not want him back all the time! I want to be good enough, aniki, I want to be enough!” he wailed, his hands rubbing at his eyes to try and keep the bubbling tears from falling.

Mondo blinked in surprise at the emotional confession, and looked to the side in guilt. What he said was true: he had been too focused on getting Ishimaru back, he never realized that he may have hurt Ishida’s feelings. And looking around at the kitchen, and the _almost_ edible pancakes Ishida had managed to make sitting on the table, he was trying to live up to his counterpart’s high standards.

Without giving himself the chance to think, Mondo pulled Ishida into his arms, bracing himself to be burned, but found himself pleasantly surprised when Ishida gave off little more than a gentle steam. He rested his chin on the top of Ishida’s head, which was covered in pancake batter and sticky to the touch. His arms circle Ishida’s waist and Mondo buried his face in Ishida’s sweet-smelling hair to hide his reddening cheeks. As soon as he felt his creator’s touch, Ishida instantly halted his futile attempts to stop his overflowing tears, and with only a moment of hesitation, returned the hug and grabbing at the back of Mondo’s shirt as though he was scared Mondo would disappear. Ishida sniffled into Mondo’s chest, and Mondo made hushing noises that he hoped sounded soothing. He was much better than he used to be at comforting people, but this was different -- Ishimaru had always seemed so strong, he had always been the one comforting Mondo. He always knew what to say. Never before had the shoe been on the other foot in this way.

Mondo had to admit, though. He liked the feeling of Ishida’s warm body in his arms. The heat he gave off seemed reminiscent of someone’s body heat, or if they had a fever, at least. He fought off a chuckle at the thought.

He couldn't deny that Ishida was a lot like him. He saw himself in him, certainly; he was overshadowed by his brother, just trying to win the love and respect of someone else, and feeling like a second choice. He knew how that felt. He wanted to ease that feeling in his beloved robot. Even if he wasn’t his kyoudai, hopefully Ishimaru would return soon, and in the meantime he would stand by Ishida. He could tell he had just as big a heart as his mundane twin.

Mondo pulled away from Ishida to look into his red eyes, the same eyes as Ishimaru.  
“Hey, Ishida. You’re great, a’ight? Don’t forget it. Now, I’ll help you! I know we can dish out a couple o’ pancakes together, right? And then we’ll clean up together! Sound good?”

The android in question looked up at Mondo with the biggest goddamn eyes the engineer had ever seen, and his face broke out in a ray of sunshine and he smiled as wide as Mondo had ever seen him (or Ishimaru) smile. He gave a determined nod and shot up on his feet, beginning talk about this recipe he had found online and how he wanted to add chocolate chips “to sweeten them up.” Mondo tried to hide his smile, as he found himself thinking, with just a twinge of pride, _I must’a made him really, really happy._

***

Eating with Ishida had been the most fun meal Mondo had ever experienced. It was nice to cut back and not worry about Ishimaru’s (admittedly sometimes annoying) insistence on following proper table etiquette. Ishida topped his pancakes in butter and syrup, and Mondo watched in astonishment as the android continued to devour the _entire goddamn stack_ , before burping in satisfaction. Mondo laughed hysterically, and the two were soon having an intense burping competition, before Mondo asked Ishida a question about his ability to eat and burp as a robot, and Ishida chuckled and answered with a joke that probably should never be said at the table.

Ishida and Mondo settled onto the couch together, watching and joking whatever low-budget movies they could find in the TV cabinet. Mondo couldn’t help but notice Ishida’s exaggerated hand gestures and facial features as he spoke; there was no doubt he was an entirely separate entity from Ishimaru. Inevitably, they drifted closer and closer to each other, and then Ishida’s thigh was pressed unashamedly against Mondo’s. He didn’t even seem to notice. It felt almost like he had his old brother back, but something more. He found himself feeling so fulfilled and whole. He hadn’t felt this way in so long, it felt, and it was the sort of emptiness that you didn’t realize was there until it was filled once more.

It was only when Ishida’s battery was running low and it was time to recharge and begin preparing to retire for the day did Mondo glimpse a new notification on his phone. A text from Chi.

 **Cheerio (4:34 PM):** _hiya mon-chan r u ok? i got ur msgs u sound sorta stressed whats going on?_  
**Cheerio (5:28 PM):** _hey mon?? r u ok? im worried abt u, u mentioned there was smth wrong w ishi rite?_  
**Cheerio (6:47 PM):** _i bet ur busy, then! hope ur ok msg me when u see these k?_

Mondo smiled in equal parts sheepishness and affection for his nerdy best friend. That is, besides Ishimaru. And now, he supposed, Ishida?

 **Mondo Oowada (7:58 PM):** _hi sorry chi_

He put his phone down for a moment. Did he really want to have Chihiro come and fix Ishida? It had just been a couple of days with him, but already he found himself apprehensive to say goodbye. How could this have happened? What was he gonna do?!

 **Mondo Oowada (8:01 PM):** _nah its okay, false alarm, he’s okay now_

Mondo sighed and flopped onto the bed onto his back. While he did find his heart beating faster around Ishida, he hoped it wouldn’t be like this forever. He would never want to outright choose between Ishida and Ishimaru, but hopefully Ishimaru would come back eventually. If not, well … he’ll worry about that if it happens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reminder, I have a tumblr! I'll try to post my writing stuff there more often. Thedukeofmania.tumblr.com

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked this, thank you for reading! This is not my first time writing Dangan fanfics, especially for Ishimondo, but my first time actually posting one. Any feedback is appreciated!  
> I'm also on tumblr: thedukeofmania.tumblr.com


End file.
